Long Time Leaving (26 page)

F
rankly, it does not do me a lot of good, as a Southern white boy in New York, to be defending another Southern white boy against a Northern woman. However, when Jane Smiley jumped on my man Mark Twain, was I in the middle of it, interjecting calmly, “Got your back, Mark”?

I was. “If necessary, I'll wear a dress,” I said when invited to take part in a panel discussion with William Styron, Shelby Foote, Justin Kaplan, and Stanley Crouch. The reason I said that is, I was invited to be on the panel only if they couldn't get a woman. But that's all right; they couldn't get one (Smiley herself declined, as did Toni Morrison and, no doubt, many others), so there I was, boogity boogity, defending
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
against the charge—leveled by Smiley in
Harper's—
that it is not a great or even a serious book, that it can't hold a candle to
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The site was a big Barnes and Noble store in Manhattan. The occasion was a new edition of
Huck Finn
incorporating some hitherto unpublished passages from the recently discovered manuscript of the first half of the novel. But what was foremost in our panelizing thoughts was Smi-ley's attack, to which we responded as three old Southern white boys (Styron, Foote, and me) and one vested male Twainist (Kaplan)
would
respond, you might say.

Crouch canceled, so the sole non-white-guy element was the moderator, Brent Staples, who took Smiley's side, for the sake of argument. And did it well, too, but you could tell deep down inside he was no Northern woman. Well, I
vote
like a Northern woman, pretty much.

When he has to, Huck wears a dress. Tries to pass himself off as Sarah Williams, then says his name is Mary, then, when challenged, says it's Sarah Mary Williams. Huck also identifies himself as George Peters,
George Jackson, Adolphus, Tom Sawyer, Charles William Albright, and Aleck James Hopkins. Sam Clemens himself tried several pen names— W. Epaminondas Blab, Sgt. Fathom, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Quintus Curtius Snodgrass, and Josh—before he settled on Mark Twain. I question whether distinguished literary panelists, even white male ones, would still be rallying behind the man's reputation, frankly, if he had kept on as W. Epaminondas Blab. Or as Snodgrass either; as either Snodgrass. Mark Twain is good, bing bing, like Babe Ruth. A good name for an author is regular in meter. William Faulkner. Emily Dickinson. Edna St. Vincent Millay. I doubt that Shelby Foote's family went so far as to consider naming him Metrical, but check this out:

Whereas you try fitting “Roy Blount Jr.” into a poem. Free verse, even. As Royal Bunting or Rory Block, I might have been
the first
person asked to be on the Huck Finn panel. But when I was getting started as a writer, I couldn't become Royce Bolt or Arroyo Blue, because my father, Roy Sr., was alive, and it would have hurt his feelings. He wouldn't have said anything to me himself, but my mother would have let me know: “Do you realize what the other businessmen are saying to your father? ‘What's your boy calling himself now?’ It has broken his heart.”

Mark Twain didn't have that to contend with. Nor did he have the handicap, when he was getting started as a writer, that someone had already not only gotten dibs on the Mississippi River but also figured out how to get the most humor out of American English. When I came along, people were calling every new funny American writer “the next Mark Twain.” Mark Twain, Jr., in other words.

So you see I have some issues to work through with Mark Twain myself. But you don't catch me comparing
Huck Finn
unfavorably to
Pluck and Luck,
by Horatio Alger, Jr. People would just say, “Well, he
would
say that. Juniors stick together.” I hate being dismissed categorically.

I make an effort, accordingly, not to sound like a generic Southern white male person. During the panel discussion, I averred that Jim would have been a fuller character, and harder for sentimental white readers to like, if a black author had imagined him. I volunteered that I could see how
Huck Finn
would bother a black reader. I came out against compelling anybody to read it. I cited Shelley Fisher Fishkin's recent revelation,
in her book
Was Huck Black?
of how deeply the art
of Huck Finn
is rooted in African American culture. I announced that everything worthwhile in American culture is a mixture of black and white, and that
Huck Finn
was like rock and roll in combining black rhythm and blues with white adolescence and marketing.

And I resisted the temptation, undoubtedly prejudicial, to cry out for the world to hear: “Jane Smiley
would
like Harriet Beecher Stowe's book better than Mark Twain's! Because Jane Smiley is, as Harriet Beecher Stowe was, a Northern woman!”

Twain, Smiley says, is unable to “reconcile the felt memory of boyhood with the cruel implications of the social system within which that boyhood was lived.” Fair enough. On the other hand, “Stowe, New Englander, daughter of Puritans and thinkers, active in the abolitionist movement and in the effort to aid and educate escaped slaves, had no such personal conflict.” My reaction to that is, no doubt, the reaction I
would
have: How can anybody claim to know anything about race in America—at least to know the kinds of things you have to know to write fiction—when she has no personal conflict about it? When I think of someone who has no personal conflict about race, I think of Ronald Reagan (especially now), that little blue-blob symbol of the Atlanta Olympics, and, yes, maybe a kind of generic puritan New England woman….

There I go again. Is there no one who
won't
try to categorize another person in such a way as to render his or her opinions suspect? If you ask me, of course, opinions are inherently suspect, especially to the extent that solidarity is involved. And yet the more solidarity there is behind an opinion, the more confidently people tend to act upon it. As Mark Twain once wrote, “During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the church …imprisoned, tortured, hanged and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been.”

One thing about
Huck Finn
is, it's not a book of opinion. Here's a passage from it:

“He come rummaging around in the dark amongst the shingle bundles where I was, and put his hand on me. I was warm and soft and naked; so he says Ouch!’ and jumped back.”

Huck Finn,
to be sure, does not do justice to the atrocities of slavery. That's because it is even less about slavery than
Moby Dick
is about whaling.
I think
Huck Finn—a
story told by a child whose father beats him viciously—is about how people feel to themselves and to other people, and about the adjustments people make to the differential involved.

Another thing about
Huck Finn,
its publication didn't lead to carnage. Smiley mentions that when Stowe visited the White House in 1863, Lincoln said to her, “So this is the little lady who made this great war.” I don't know what Stowe said in reply. “You bet your ass, big gent” would have been what Abe had coming, or at least so it seems to us today. Whether that's what she
should
have said, I am in no position to say, because I wasn't around at the time. Mark Twain wasn't, strictly speaking, around at the time either; he was Sam Clemens and he was out in California dodging the war. One thing Mark Twain wasn't was a warmonger. “Two or three centuries from now,” he wrote, “it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian—not to acquire his religion, but his guns.” Even if my Confederate sympathies were as clear to me as they may be to a Northern woman, I would have a hard time deciding whether going AWOL from the Civil War was nobler or less noble than starting it.

Nor am I disposed to say that Smiley is prejudiced against Twain because he is not a Northern woman. For one thing, I cannot look into her heart. For another thing, if I did say that, people would just say I
would
say that, because I
would
prefer the novel by the Southern man. And I, irritable old ambivalent Southern liberal that I am, would be so self-conscious about their assumptions about my assumptions that I'd be liable to play right into their hands.

Whereas Smiley is too sharp to present where she is coming from as an issue. “White Americans always think racism is a feeling…,” she writes. And it's hard, or at least confusing, to say, “She
would
think white Americans always think that,” because she is a white American herself.

Even so, she has a point. The trouble is, she's got too tight a grip on it. She goes on: “To most Americans, it seems more honorable and nicer to reject [the feeling that they are racist], so they do, but they almost invariably fail to understand that how they
feel
means very little to black Americans, who understand racism as a way of structuring American culture, American politics, and the American economy.” And since all Huck ever does about racism is to show that he's relatively good-hearted about it, “to invest
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
with ‘greatness’ is to underwrite a very simplistic and evasive theory of what racism is and to promulgate it.”

By that reckoning, there we sat, we panelists, just a-promulgatin’
racism to beat the band. We three Southerners even agreed with the following statement that Robert Penn” Warren once made to Styron: “Let's face it.
Everybody's
a racist.” Of course, we
would
agree with that. And maybe I
would
disagree with Smiley's racism argument, but I do anyway, as follows:

To regard racism as a feeling is simplistic and evasive, all right, but it's no
theory
at all. It's not even thinking. Smiley is the one who's theorizing, and she's doing it simplistically. To be sure, racism is less subjective than a feeling, but it's also less mechanistic than “a way of structuring.” Which is not to deny that racism pervades the American culture, politics, economy, and most anything else Smiley cares to name. In fact, I, for my part, would feel racist, or at least silly, if I were to toss off a brisk declaration of what “means” what to black Americans and what black Americans “understand.” Staples, the panel's moderator, is a black American. He took Smiley's side for the sake of argument, as I say, but in closing he stated that Mark Twain was one of the few people he regarded as “seers.” Of course, you
could
say he
would
state that: he's a man.

But even if it's true, as Smiley says, that “most readers intuitively reject the last twelve chapters”
of Huck Finn,
so far as I know Smiley is the only reader who doesn't reject all of
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So why
would
anybody in her right mind proclaim that Stowe's is a better book than Twain's?

For the national good, perhaps. Hemingway (“thinking of himself, as always,” puts in Smiley) declared that all of modern American literature grew from
Huck Finn.
Even if it did, Smiley says, it
shouldn't
have. Since Stowe analyzes slavery more extensively and righteously, “it undoubtedly would have been better for American literature” to have grown out of
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
To me, that's like saying it would be better for people to come from heaven than from sex.

I
could
say that Smiley's is the voice of the Widder Douglas, always telling Huck what would be good for him, which is always the absolutely last thing he is going to do if he can help it. The voice of the Widder Douglas, only more Northern and theoretical. But I
won't
say that. Some of my best friends are Northern women.

I'll tell you the truth, there has been so much solidarity in favor of Mark Twain in recent years that I'd like to see somebody come along and outdo him, even if it's not going to be me. From the way she writes in
Harper's,
it won't be Smiley. I've never read any of her acclaimed novels, only the reviews, which I'd love to have for my books word for word.
Here's the last paragraph of a review in
Newsweek,
by Laura Shapiro, of Smiley's Pulitzer-winning
A Thousand Acres:

“In the end Smiley does what Shakespeare himself never did: she creates a female heroine who grows through her own anguish until she towers over the hero and conquers him.”

There you go. That's something Shakespeare
wouldn't
do. (They say his wife was a lot like that, so maybe he didn't feel a need to.) But I'm not going to say it's something a Northern woman novelist
would
do.

So. Let's accept that Smiley in good faith prefers Stowe (after reading whom, Chekhov wrote, “I had an unpleasant sensation which mortals feel after eating too many raisins or currants”) over Twain (who wrote in a notebook, “‘Rise early. It is the early bird that catches the worm.’ Don't be fooled by this absurd saw; I once knew a man who tried it. He got up at sunrise and a horse bit him”). And let's rule out any broadly generic explanation. What conceivable explanation does that leave?

It leaves this one: Twain first hit it big nationally with a sketch called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” That sketch refers to a Jim Smiley as “infamous” and to a Leonidas W. Smiley as “a myth.”

It was small of me to refer to Jane Smiley, however uninvidiously, as a Northern woman. She is something far more distinctive: an avenging Smiley.

Here's the tipoff: she never once mentions, even just in passing, that there's anything
funny
about
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

If there is a movement afoot to decanonize Mark Twain, all I can say is,
woooooooo.
He's had canons to the left of him and canons to the right of him, and he's still like Miss Rudolph the conjure-woman's monkey in one of Richard Pryor's Mudbone stories. Mudbone is in the conjure-woman's house and her monkey is jumping on his neck and messing with his ears and Mudbone tells her, “Miss Rudolph, please, will you do something about this monkey!”